Why wasn't "the promised land" somewhere nice, like Tahiti, instead of in a shithole desert that already had people living in it?

Christians love Joos for some reason, and supposedly the Jooish homeland was Palestine.

Much of the Middle East is desert, as seen here:

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environm...

But not all of it. Israel is in a fertile part of the Middle East, as seen here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertile_Crescent

Terrible answers..... It appears to be because the people who wrote the bible were superstitious idiots.

because "God works in mysterious ways"

You never read the Bible?

not sure